The more things change.....

I’ve been hopeful that, over time, all the “kids” who grew up on video games, SMSing friends, IM, etc, would continue to get into jobs as those “take a memo” types retired to golf courses around the globe.

I fear it is going to take yet another generation of pencil pushing, moronic, beauracatic nit wits to “retire” before someday we finally use technology the way it is supposed to work and actually help us.

If you are thinking about using live chat on your website and are thinking about the product LivePerson, use care. Consider this story, happening live, as I type this.

I’m working on my free everything project. One of those free things is a domain name I got.  Turns out there are some issues so I hop over to registerfly, the service provider I’m using for this experiment.  Ah, live chat, cool.

Up pops a box. Enter your account name and:

Hello, Welcome to 24/7 Registerfly.com Customer Support Service. Please wait for a site operator to respond. Your call will be answered in the order that it was received.

Sigh.. Okay, no big deal. minimize it and it will pop up when somebody comes online to help me. I can work on some PHP code that I am futzing with (thanks Ken!) as well as play with this Rails stuff.

Or so I wish.  Every 120 seconds this pops up in my face:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yep. For 45 minutes (so far), this puppy pops up, over and over again. When you are typing, guess where your typing happens to land. Right, in the chat window. Minimize and back she comes over and over again.  And I’m still waiting…

Okay, it didn’t have highlights from Musical Oklahoma screaming out of the speakers but jezzzzz… I’ll spare you the rant on how this should be properly done and just suggest that you STRONGLY think about the whole process of your support options. Live Chat can be great or it can be just as annoying as anything you can inflict on a person.

Back to the waiting…